The Hyborian

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence Don't worry Atlascott, I took Basil's comments about the "Straw Man" etc. to be a rather high handed way to not answer the meat of your argument. Its a strategy less formally known as the "try to look smart and keep talking" method. Its typically what a college professor/politician does when someone asks them a question they can't answer. If Basil wanted to discredit your arguments he should have attacked its merits, not made an arcane reference that only some of the posters he would catch and then move on as if that settled the matter. It would have been better so say nothing, quote only the part he chose to respond to, and make his point there. I find the whole approach very telling. T.H.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

Re: Feedback on "Tank" Calling someone else's idea "retarded", without even bothering to state a reason why or a counter arguement is more than a little rude. I think the retarded thing here is your social skills. If you thinks is a lousy idea, thats fine, but explain why. Posting this way sounds like name calling. T.H.

Re: Nomenclature The main issue I have with power defence is that I have a hard time coming up with a Fx for it. I usually like to have some on my super characters. Adjustment powers are to potentially crippling to leave that kind of hole in your defences. But I have trouble imagining exactly what the Power Def represents. Afterall, it resists against everything from magic spells to tasers to gas guns to mutant viruses to nanites to . . .well, you get the picture. Other than saying "well, my charcter is really tough, he could resists these attacks through toughness and willpower", im not sure how to describe my own power. It always makes me feel like a bit of a powergamer, which I dont like. On the other hand, I usually feel like its too important to go without. T.H.

Re: Need Help: Attacking through Images Well, sort of. But with duplicates one duplicate could chuck a thowing star, one could attack with a sword, another could use a net-based entange attack, etc. Using images the attacks all have to originate from the character, not the image, and the character would one attack opportunity per phase. Yes, there are ways (sweep, autofire, etc) to make a multiple attack, but you still have only one opportunity to attack. With duplicates each duplicate would be throwing that autofire/sweep at the enemy. Having said that, however, I do think Images is a better power to simulate the Fx in this case. But the "image" ninja can not attack without the main charcter having a half phase to active that indirect attack power.

Re: Looking for Spidery names ... sort of. You took my answer. Actually, I knew someone years ago who ran a spiderman ripoff called "The Arachnid Kid".

Re: To agree or disagree with Steve's answer I would go with Steve's answer- mostly. I would let a single attacker throwing a singpe power "lump" their drain damage. If Captain Taser zaps the villian multiple times with his taser touch to drain stun, I would add the total drains together and have them recover at whatever rate the power allowed recovery. If Captain Taser then pulled out another gadget that disrupted the villian's balance (best bought as a drain against Dex) that drain would recover seperatly. If Captain Taser's sidekick Tear Gas Boy also hit the same villian with a stun drain, that would have to be tracked seperatly, and would recover seperatly as well. I dont buy the argument that we should lump adjustment power damage because other forms of damage do so. The reason is that adjustment powers have special rules for how you recover from them. By overt definition they work differently. T.H.

Re: Need Help: Attacking through Images A couple of thoughts: Images vs. Duplication. If you are using images then you still only get one attack per phase. With duplication all the duplicates could attack at the same time. Of course, your duplicates could "die", images cant get killed. (unless you are being super-realistic with them, so that your enemy does not realize they are images). You metioned sense, I would look at Clairsentience. That way you could be in another room and still control the image and make attacks.

Re: Feelin' philosophical... I think part of it is that the gaming community has gotten older on average. Many of the peole who started playing in the early days of the hobby (late 70s early 80s) as kids are still playing. And honestly, Im not sure how well the industry is doing at recruiting younger players. Back in gradeschool when I got my first edition AD&D hardbacks I lived in a town that had 5 TV channels, no internet, and video game technology that peaked at the Atari 2600. RPG's were the natural extension of my geek interests. Clearly, there is a big interest in genre material out there right now, but I think only a fairly small percentage of that fanbase is attracted to pen and pager rpgs. How many hundreds of thousands of subscribers is World of Warcraft up to now? And even for a niche genre like supers, City of Heros had 180,000 subscribers at one point (dont know if they lost any ground since WOW took over the world.) A lot of people clearly enjoy the RPG experience, but I think a great many of them are getting it from the Internet these days.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence Quite correct. What I should have said is that it does not have an effect on your Combat Values. As for loosing your sense of balance, Im not sure what effect it could have other than penalites to movement and targeting. Balance keeps you oriented in space, and messing with it should have some negative penalites. But, flash is the wrong tool to simulate this. If you flash my blance, I cant target with it, which I probably was not doing in the first place (except for Basil of course). To impose combat penalites beyond that exceeds the mandate of what the flash power does. And if the power has no effect beyond removing balance as a targeting sense, then you have paid points for an attack that makes your target a little woozy, but has no real game effect. You ask "what would this do?" The real question is "what would you want it do?" The heart and soul of Hero is that the powers are FX independant. Think of what you want your attack to do, and then choose the power(s) that best represent it. Its totally up to you what disruption of balance would do to someone. Thats because disruption of balance is a Fx, not a power or game mechanic. Don't think in terms of "what would happen if I flashed balance?" Thats a game mechanic effect. Decide what your special effect would do, then look at some other powers to simulate it.

Re: Linking a characteristic decrease to a power Beat me to it. Yep, side effect.

Re: I don't understand Hallucination Spray My initial reaction was much the same, but after reading the NCC rule there is an option for powers that a character can activate at will but not control the effects. The listed value for that is (-1). However, for the -1 limitation I think that the results would be more random. The target might see something terrifying, but they might also see their highschool sweethart, the king of Siam, or a 12 foot tall pink and purple bunny doing the Lindy. If the power was always scarry, then it should probably be (-1/2), like a set effect, as TheRealLemming suggested.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence HUMM, major formating boo-boo in above post. Sorry if its hard to read. Im a rules lawyer, not a computer geek. The Hyborian

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence A subtle point is being missed here. Actually, not being able to see has NO GAME MECHANIC IMPACT on combat, unless sight is your only targeting sense. If my character has passive sonar as a targeting sense, and you flash my sight, I am still at full combat value. You have to flash both sight and passive sonar, THUS REMOVING ALL MY TARGETING SENSES, to give me CV penalties. Flashing "balance" would not give me a penalty in combat, because I was not using "balance" to target you in the first place. All flash does IN MECHANICAL TERMS is temporarily prevent a character from using a sense to target. I think buying this kind of attack as a flash is a way to get a drain or transform around a target's power defense. Who is going to by flash defense for their "balance" when they build a character? No one. Basically Its a NND that costs no points, and that is unfair and unbalanced. That doesn't mean that you cant have balancing affecting powers, but I would see it as a drain, or perhaps a transform.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence lol I flash your sense of comedic timing, no wisecracks for the rest of the fight. . .

Re: Help with balancing fighters with magic users A couple of things to consider: Is there an active point max on the magical powers? That would go a long way to keeping magical damage in line with martial dammage. Some more details on your magic system would be helpfull. I can tell you from hard experience that if you leave the magic system too "open" for heroic fantasy that you can get some nasty powers pretty cheap. Second, there are a lot of ways to increase damage with heroic melee weapons. Martail arts with weapon elements, extra marial art DCs, skill levels spent on damage instead of CV, strength beyond the weapon str minimum. I dont know what point level you are playing at, but its very possible for an experienced charcter to turn that 1 1/2d6 sword into a 3d6+1 attack. And thats the same as a 50 active point attack, which is a pretty hefty spell in many campaigns.

Re: [iron] Why do you dislike the Four Color/Silver age (No Flames please) The words "status quo" came up in this thread. I think silver age comics often were guilty of supporting the status quo in many ways, but were at their best when they defied it. Stan Lee, theat egomanical carnival barker of the comic world, love him or hate him, wrote some genre reversing stories in his day. Spiderman, the super with problems and doubts, driven as much by grief and shame as anything else. The Fantasic Four, supers with disfunctional family issues and self esteem problems. And to jump the other side of the fence into the DC world, How about Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Take a chin up chest out old timer like the Lantern, and put him in a book with Green Arrow, who up to that point had been a silly batman ripoff with a cave under a mansion, a youthfull ward, and a yellow submarine, and turn them into a socially conscious exploration of American cultural divisions and race (ok, with supervillians). My point being that each age of comics has innovators and status quo writers who write what is popular without depth. There is great storytelling in the Silver Age, although much of it was crap. Same with every other age of comics.

Re: Valdorian Age Quite true, but stereotypes sometimes exist for a reason. The big three for fantasy character designs are "Im focused on physical combat", "Im focused on using magic", and "Im focused on noncombat/technical skills." Fighter, wizard, thief. You can come up with combinations, and flavor, but a truely "original" character that can still participate in "traditional" fantasy storylines is hard to come up with.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence Why cant smell be a targeting sense? You just have to pay the points to make it targeting. If I am playing Captain Grizzly, avenger of the wilderness, I think he might have smell so sensitive that I can target with it. Its just a matter of playing the points. As for Taste, the problem is that taste is no range in its default state. You have to touch something with your tounge to taste it. Pay the points for range and you can taste from across the room. Weird FX probably, but you can do it. Pay some more points and your ranged taste is so sensitive you can target with it. Now, with balance, the issue is that it doesn't give you any information OUTSIDE of your own body. It just affects you, it does not sense other objects, even if you are touching them. As I said in my post, its an awareness, but not a sense. It doesn't tell you where a foe is. Further, i think significant penalties from a Flash attack are out of game balance. Now, before someone freaks and writes a flame post about what happens when you get flashed, think about this. Flash does not impose penalties, but rather you have combat penalties when you no longer have a working targeting sense. You can flash my sight all day long, but if I have another targeting sense I can use then my CVs stay the same. By flashing balance you want to impose signigicant combat penalties without any recorse for the target character. Who buys a "backup" for balance? What is really being talked about here is a cheap drain, and I would thus disallow it if it was my campaign. I dont have problems with a power that disrupts the targets balance, but it needs to be purchased another way, probably through and adjustment power. As for your alien with the ability to sense which way is "down" at a distance, thats a detect with range, defined as "detect spacial alignment". It would be nearly useless on a standard earth, but in a dimension jumping campagin perhaps it would be necessary.

Re: Hand To Hand Attacks I would skip the HTH attack power alltogether and just use skills. If the Fx is that he is a skilled streetfigher then buy a martial arts style called "Back Ally Street Fighting". If you still dont have enough dammage with your martial strike then buy some additional dammage classes with your martial arts. You can then buy weapon elements for the marial arts to use them with clubs, knives, etc, as well as just your fist. As others have said, you have to specifiy heroic or superheroic rules for weapons and adding dammage. From the power levels you are talking about it sounds heroic to me, however. In a heroic campaign weapons have a base damage and a strength minimum. Strength over the strength minimum may be added to dammage. Damage classes from marital arts may as well, provided you have the weapon element on your martial arts. Killing attack weapons get 1 DC from every 2 DC in your marial arts, normal attacks its one for one. You can also use two skill levels with the attack to increase a weapon attack 1 DC. The cardinal rule is that you can never more than double the original weapon dammage. If you want to use HA anyway, the standard rule is that its 5pts per 1d6 (same as strength) with a manditory (-1/2) limitation on it. It just adds to your strength dammage. BUT. . . it has to be a campaign where you are allowed to buy powers, as HA is a power. In strict Heroic campaigns your GM my insist that you go the skills route.

Re: Sunspot clone - OIHID - Instant Change Quite correct. Sunspot's "transformation" was just the Fx of turning his powers on. It was more or less instant (0 phase action). It only turned off if he ran out of juice. According to 5th edition you can only take OIHID is it takes some time to change ID, or you might be prevented from changing somehow. Most hero ID's are only special effects.

Re: Question about "DANGER SENSE DODGING" Thats quite true. I guess in a genre where a player might want to play a characer who turns into a big green monsters when they get angry I should not get too hung up on "realism".

Re: Question about "DANGER SENSE DODGING" I still think that I would go with a change environemnt for that effect. Im not sure how you make the hex appear further away by itself. Is there an empty spot and the hex shows up over thataway? How do you make the hex look smaller by itself? Everything in it little and there is a empty gap around the outside? I woud, however, certainly allow a power that affected the perception of the attacker. One possible one would be Change Environemnt, warped spacial perception, with CV penalties. You focus it on the attacker (not the hex that you are in) and everything looks like funhouse mirrors to him, making it a bugger to aim. But doing something to the hex itself IMHO, would result in a very funny looking hex, surrounded by normal looking hexes, and would thus be no harder to hit with a hand grenade or garden hose.

Re: Equipment Pools?